"None of those other people committed our troops to go fight
and die for "bad intelligence". None of those other people
are mass murderers. "

Look in the dictionary and see if under the defintion of a lie it says
anything about it involving the commitment of troops. The fact that
you would refer to President Bush as a mass murder, tells us what you
really are about. By your perverted logic, Roosevelt, Churchill and
Truman were mass murders too because a lot of innocent people died in
WWII.

"It is up to the President of the United States to not commit
treason by committing our armed forces under false pretense
and "bad intelligence". "

Yeah, right and intelligence is always perfect in your little world.
And everyone of the liberal dreamers you just love, did everything they
could to gut the US intelligence community for decades. The
intelligence community couldn't even see the collapse of the Soviet
Union coming, yet you expect them to have 100% knowledge of exactly
what Iraq is up to? LOL

"To the contrary, there's not been a single shred of evidence Iraq
lied about their WMD capability, or rather their lack of it. The
simple fact is, Bush couldn't allow UN inspections to be
completed, because they would have shown no evidence of
WMD, which then would have destroyed any justification for
an invasion"

Yeah right. Couldn't let them be completed? How long were we supposed
to wait? Iraq through the inspectors out in the Clinton
administration. Forget about that? Then, even with 100,000 US troops
on Iraqs borders, they still were not fully cooperating with the UN
inspectors. Had we listened to you and France, the troops would have
come home, only to have Sadam start his games all over again. But he
can;t do that now, can he?

Here, for the record are excerpts from Hans Blix report to the UN, in
Jan 2003, on the eve of war. And it took 100,000 troops and the
promise of war to get this level of cooperation. Read it and tell me a
reasonable persons would not conclude that Ithere was plenty of
evidence Iraq still had not complied with the UN disarmanemt demands
and was very likely hiding much mo

Hans Blix:
I begin by recalling that inspections as a part of a disarmament
process in Iraq started in 1991, immediately after the Gulf War. They
went on for eight years, until 1998 when inspectors were withdrawn.

Therefore, for nearly four years, there were no inspectors. They were
resumed only at the end of November last year.
Resolution 687 in 1991, like the subsequent resolutions I shall refer
to, required cooperation by Iraq, but such was often withheld or given
grudgingly.

Unlike South Africa, which decided on its own to eliminate its nuclear
weapons and welcomed the inspection as a means of creating confidence
in its disarmament, Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine
acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament which was demanded of it
and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and
to live in peace.

As we know, the twin operation declare and verify, which was prescribed
in Resolution 687, too often turned into a game of hide and seek.
While Iraq claims, with little evidence, that it destroyed all
biological weapons unilaterally in 1991, it is certain that UNSCOM
destroyed large biological weapons production facilities in 1996.

One of three important questions before us today is, How much might
remain undeclared and intact from before 1991 and possibly thereafter?
The second question is, What, if anything, was illegally produced or
procured after 1998 when the inspectors left. And the third question
is, How it can be prevented that any weapons of mass destruction be
produced or procured in the future?

For nearly three years, Iraq refused to accept any inspections by
UNMOVIC. It was only after appeals by the secretary-general and Arab
states and pressure by the United States and other member states that
Iraq declared on 16 September last year that it would again accept
inspections without conditions.

Resolution 1441 was adopted on 8 November last year and emphatically
reaffirmed the demand on Iraq to cooperate. It required this
cooperation to be immediate, unconditional and active. The resolution
contained many provisions which we welcome as enhancing and
strengthening the inspection regime. The unanimity by which it was
adopted sent a powerful signal that the council was of one mind in
creating a last opportunity for peaceful disarmament in Iraq through
inspection.

In this updating, I'm bound, however, to register some problems. The
first are related to two kinds of air operations. While we now have the
technical capability to send a U-2 plane placed at our disposal for
aerial imagery and for surveillance during inspections and have
informed Iraq that we plan to do so, Iraq has refused to guarantee its
safety unless a number of conditions are fulfilled.

As these conditions went beyond what is stipulated in Resolution 1441
and what was practiced by UNSCOM and Iraq in the past, we note that
Iraq is not so far complying with our requests. I hope this attitude
will change.

I'm obliged to note some recent disturbing incidents and harassment.
For instance, for some time farfetched allegations have been made
publicly that questions posed by inspectors were of an intelligence
character. While I might not defend every question that inspectors
might have asked, Iraq knows that they do not serve intelligence
purposes and Iraq should not say so.

Demonstrations and outbursts of this kind are unlikely to occur in Iraq
with initiative or encouragement from the authorities. We must ask
ourselves what the motives may be for these events. They do not
facilitate an already difficult job, in which we try to be effective,
professional, and at the same time correct. Where our Iraqi
counterparts have some complaint, they can take it up in a calmer and
less unpleasant manner.

Paragraph 9 of Resolution 1441 states that this cooperation shall be
"active." It is not enough to open doors. Inspection is not a game of
catch as catch can. Rather, as I noted, it is a process of verification
for the purpose of creating confidence. It is not built upon the
premise of trust. Rather, it is designed to lead to trust, if there is
both openness to the inspectors and action to present them with items
to destroy or credible evidence about the absence of any such items.

These reports do not contend that weapons of mass destruction remain in
Iraq, but nor do they exclude that possibility. They point to a lack of
evidence and inconsistencies which raise question marks which must be
straightened out if weapons dossiers are to be closed and confidence is
to arise. They deserve to be taken seriously by Iraq, rather than being
brushed aside as evil machinations of UNSCOM.

Regrettably, the 12,000-page declaration, most of which is a reprint of
earlier documents, does not seem to contain any new evidence that will
eliminate the questions or reduce their number.

Even Iraq's letter sent in response to our recent discussions in
Baghdad to the president of the Security Council on 24th of January
does not lead us to the resolution of these issues.

I shall only give some examples of issues and questions that need to be
answered, and I turn first to the sector of chemical weapons.

The nerve agent VX is one of the most toxic ever developed. Iraq has
declared that it only produced VX on a pilot scale, just a few tons,
and that the quality was poor and the product unstable.

Consequently, it was said that the agent was never weaponized.

Iraq said that the small quantity of [the] agent remaining after the
Gulf War was unilaterally destroyed in the summer of 1991.

UNMOVIC, however, has information that conflicts with this account.
There are indications that Iraq had worked on the problem of purity and
stabilization and that more had been achieved than has been declared.
Indeed, even one of the documents provided by Iraq indicates that the
purity of the agent, at least in laboratory production, was higher than
declared.

There are also indications that the agent was weaponized. In addition,
there are questions to be answered concerning the fate of the VX
precursor chemicals, which Iraq states were lost during bombing in the
Gulf War or were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq.

The discovery of a number of 122 mm chemical rocket warheads in a
bunker at the storage depot, 170 kilometers southwest of Baghdad, was
much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the
rockets must have been moved here in the past few years at a time when
Iraq should not have had such munitions. The investigation of these
rockets is still proceeding.

Iraq states that they were overlooked from 1991 from a batch of some
2,000 that were stored there during the Gulf War. This could be the
case. They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery
of a few rockets does not resolve, but rather points to the issue of
several thousand of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for. The
finding of the rockets shows that Iraq needs to make more effort to
ensure that its declaration is currently accurate.

I turn to biological weapons. I mention the issue of anthrax to the
council on previous occasions, and I come back to it as it is an
important one. Iraq has declared that it produced about 8,500 liters of
this biological warfare agent, which it states it unilaterally
destroyed in the summer of 1991.

Iraq has provided little evidence for this production and no convincing
evidence for its destruction
Either it should be found and be destroyed under UNMOVIC supervision or
else convincing evidence should be produced to show that it was indeed
destroyed in 1991.

Also associated with these missiles and related developments is the
import which has been taking place during the last two years of a
number of items despite the sanctions, including as late as December
2002. Foremost among these is import of 300 rockets engines which may
be used for the Al-Samud II.

Iraq has also declared the recent import of chemicals used in
propellants, test instrumentation and guidance and control system.
These items may well be for proscribed purposes; that is yet to be
determined.

In response to a recent UNMOVIC request for a number of specific
documents, the only new documents Iraq provided was a ledger of 1,093
pages which Iraq stated included all imports from 1983 to 1990 by the
Technical and Scientific Importation Division, the importing authority
for the biological weapons programs. Potentially, it might help to
clear some open issues.

The recent inspection find in the private home of a scientist of a box
of some 3,000 pages of documents, much of it relating to the lacing
enrichment of uranium, support a concern that has long existed that
documents might be distributed to the homes of private individuals.
This interpretation is refuted by the Iraqi side which claims that
research staff sometimes may bring papers from their work places.

On our side, we cannot help but think that the case might not be
isolated and that such placements of documents is deliberate to make
discovery difficult and to seek to shield documents by placing them in
private homes.